2008-02-24

The Skedge Revival

So, Belladonna -my newer Acer- has fallen ill. Hard drive issues, you know. Consequently, after some engineering and purchasing, Skedge is revived. Skedge is the hostname of my 3 year old tablet PC (also an Acer) that had also suffered hard drive issues. It's issues are hilarious, though. You see, the connector with which the hard drive connects has lost its ability to grip my hard drive. Consequently, with a little shaking, the hard drive would slip far enough out that Linux would receive a string of I/O errors, go read-only, and cause me data loss. (What else could it do? The hard drive had run away :|). Anyway, it's battery had been dying last year, so I replaced that then. Also, the AC adapter had become hazardous to the health of its users, so I have now replaced that, too. I am now employing static-free foam (that came with the adapter :) in the hard drive compartment to keep it tightly secured in place. No more issues!

I want to never own another Acer again. It's mostly structural quality that bothers me, I think. I don't think I am unduly rough on my computers, but their cases have a dozen cracks each, even in odd places that could impact usability as a whole. As well, most Acer laptops I have known (including two friends in here) easily leave key marks in the LCD screens. Consequently, I usually use a thin sheet between the keys and screen to prevent it. I knew to from my friends whose screens are awful now. The few times I have forgot have led to preliminary markings. Boo. My tablet doesn't share the same fate. The screen is remarkably durable, for the sake of its tablet experience.

I will play around with the much newer Belladonna again later, trying another hard drive to narrow down where the problem lies. I hope it is just the hard drive and not the laptop itself. It tempts me with the idea of buying Yet Another New Laptop. I am surprised at how capable Skedge still is. 256MB of RAM really can be enough. Well, as long as you don't want to run Eclipse or OpenOffice ;)

Skedge is especially delightful for its small size, as well as its tablet capabilities. Despite smaller notebooks like the Eee PC, I still get compliments regarding the petite size of Skedge. Swivelling the screen to enable drawing still impresses as well. Finally, the Linux kernel supports its quirky ACPI by default, giving me a battery indicator and functioning sleep! I haven't tried suspend to disk, but that's not too necessary for me. The multimedia keys still do not work by default. I will still have to install acerhk for those. I don't recall what I had to do to get the tablet aspect working. I formerly had to fiddle with a serial configuration file and Xorg.conf. I'm sure some future reinstallation will necessitate relearning this.

Anyway, now I have a dead desktop, and a working inferior one, as well as a dead laptop, and a working mostly inferior one. One step forward, two steps back, eh?